Random thoughts of a computer scientist who is working behind the enemy lines; and lately turned into a double agent.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

ACM EC 2012: Some early statistics

This year, together with Kevin Leyton-Brown, we co-chair ACM EC 2012, the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, which will be held in Valencia, Spain, from June 4th to June 8th.

Today was the submission deadline, and honestly I was a little bit worried about the number of submissions. 11 hours before the deadline we had just 119 submissions, a number significantly lower than for most of the recent EC conferences.

My worry did not last for long. After observing the number of new papers per hour, and by extrapolating quickly I realized that we were going to get a large number of additional submissions. The extrapolation from the regression showed that we should expect 210 submissions, maybe a little lower if submission rate lowers closer to the deadline. The answers on Twitter indicated that most probably the opposite would happen. In fact, here is the submissions over time:

Yes, most of the papers were submitted just a few hours before the deadline.

By the deadline, we had a total of 225 papers uploaded, an all-time high number of submissions. Given that this is the first time that EC will be help outside a major city in the US and that such movements typically mean lower number of submissions and attendance), we are more than happy with the number of submissions.

This year we also instituted the concept of tracks, to guarantee to the authors that their papers will be reviewed by reviewers in the same area. (A common perception is that EC is dominated by theorists who are hostile to empirical and applied work, so this separation should alleviate this concern.) Here is the approximate breakdown across tracks:

50% Theory & Foundations

15% Artificial Intelligence

15% Empirical & Applications

10% Theory+AI

5% Theory+Empirical

5% AI+ Empirical

0% in all three

We will also introduce a new concept at EC this year: Anyone who has a paper related to EC, published or accepted for publication in another venue, conference or publication over the last year, will be able to come and present the work as a poster. We hope that this will allow the conference to serve as a meeting place for exchanging ideas about the field, in addition to being a venue where novel research is being presented for the first time. We will be posting the details soon on the official website of EC'12.